 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: The Breach • Year: 2022 • Country: Canada • Director: Rodrigo Gudiño • Main cast: Allan Hawco, Emily Alatalo, Natalie Brown, Wesley French • Runtime: 93 minutes • Production company: Hangar 18 Media, Raven Banner Entertainment (distribution) • TRAILER
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I am having similar feelings about The Breach (2022) to the ones I had when I saw The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012), the debut feature film of the director Rodrigo Gudiño – one would expect from someone who is the founder and publisher of the magazine Rue Morgue, one of the most exciting and interesting publications in the genre of horror if not the most, to come out with a movie that perhaps not shocking or innovative but at least it shouldn’t be a collection of cliches. His first film was a boring and hollow ghosts movie experience and although his second film is a little more entertaining, probably because of the science-fiction elements and the mildly gory moments, it is still a mash-up of the banality of the genre.
In visual and thematic terms, The Breach (2022) takes a lot from the masters of horror like John Carpenter or David Cronenberg, with a little bit of Steven Kostanski’s The Void (2016), which are very the correct references if you wanna build a story about opening a portal to the unknown gone wrong. It also has some elements from exciting space science-fiction like Barry Levinson’s Sphere (1998) and Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon (1997), who has crossed or not the door, the madness of the ones who return, but those cool references are treated in a dull way here.
The ambition of the story never matches up with the execution of the narration and the succeeding of the scenes, with the open portal side of the plot becoming almost anecdotal and with an execution too close to the unsubstantial cheesy frights we have seen so many times. The wildness of the Ontario forests could have also served as an ally to bring something fresh to the story, away from the fancy laboratories of a story placed in an urban environment, but that element is also that although at first the movie flirts with it soon fades away in favor to an average collection of banality.
The tone of this review is mostly negative because as the running time was going on I couldn’t help but to think this was a missed great oportunity to merge a Lovecraftian science-fiction story with the evil implications of an open portal to the unknown and in the setting of a house in the woods, I didn’t want to accept the filmmakers wasting this chance. But it’s unfair to mention only the bad since this movie still has some good. It is a good story carried in a disappointing way.
The opening theme by Slash, the guitarist of Guns N Roses and Velvet Revolver, also serving as the executive producer of the film, in a hard-rock neo-western style that John Carpenter mastered in his latest films Escape from L.A. (1996) and Ghosts of Mars (2001), gave the first instants of the watching experience a sweet sense of excitement. The acting is not spectacular but it’s not one of the big flaws of the movie, and the practical special effects might not be top notch but they serve their purpose. That, plus a good premise, can make one expect something a little more spectacular with The Breach (2022). But, sadly, that didn’t happen, it’s just an OK film.
RATE: 5/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt14229154
